Depending on who you spoke to on Sunday morning, downtown Fort McMurray either lost its soul or cleaned up its act. After a final night of lap dances, drunken revelry and loud music, the Oil Sands Hotel closed its doors for the last time. It was last call, for good.

Home to Diggers Variety Club, the Oil Can Tavern and Teasers Strip Club, Fort McMurray’s local dive served drinks through the Great Depression and an oil bust before reaping the benefits of lucrative paycheques, fuelled by the world’s insatiable thirst for oil.

Standing at the corner of Franklin Avenue and Main Street, the joint was the longest-standing bar in Fort McMurray.

“Oh, it’s a sad, sad day today for everyone,” said building owner Butch Fox. “The regulars, they’re all asking me, ‘Where are we gonna go? We like it here. What are we gonna do now?’”

Many of those regulars come from a long line of customers going back generations, he added.

Unfortunately for Fort McMurray’s reputation, the joint – a two-story mass of brick as black as the oil beneath the town – provided too much of a good time. In its final days, the building became synonymous with the town’s seedy reputation as a place rife with cheap sex, easy drugs and alcohol-soaked brawls.

It became a regular stop for journalists – from Al Jazeera to GQ to Vice – hoping to glimpse the “boomtown” image of an arctic mining town in the country’s last true wilderness.

Journalists from all corners of the globe would grab a table and await a fight, a passing racial slur, drug use or drunken debauchery. To the chagrin of protective residents, some journalists were lucky to witness all four.

“I won’t really miss this place. It’s an eyesore, totally sketchy,” said Nicole Thomson, who was at the Oil Can Tavern on Saturday night. She swears friends peer-pressured her into attending the bar’s final sendoff.

“It was gross for the town’s image, kinda trashy,” she said. “There was always a fight when I came here and I think it attracted the trashier kinds of people living in this town.”

The future of the property is uncertain, but a rumour circulating among patrons and staff is that the municipality bought the building to destroy one of Fort McMurray’s remaining holdouts of sleaze. After Mayor Melissa Blake announced she was giving the downtown core a 10-year, multibillion-dollar makeover, it’s not a theory difficult to believe.

Blake sees Fort McMurray’s future as a relentlessly family-friendly experience, complete with a civic centre, an arena, an art gallery, waterfront hiking trails and a public gathering place called Franklin Square.

In February, the Northern Lights Regional Health Centre reported a monthly average of 118 babies born at the hospital in 2011. That’s more than double the rate in 2000.

Soon, Fox says downtown Fort McMurray won’t have any room for a venue promising, as one advertisement puts it, a place “where the girls never stop.”

“Fort Mac is definitely becoming a different beast,” said Eamon Leach, who was at Teasers with friends. “Maybe in a few years, this place will be even more kid friendly and family friendly.”

Municipal spokesperson Matthew Harrison told the Today that it is against policy to comment on privately owned property. When Fox was asked why he was shutting down a successful bar and strip club in a growing boomtown, he wouldn’t comment.

“All I am allowed to say is that the building has been sold for redevelopment,” said Fox. “That’s all I’m going to say on the issue.”

From a business perspective, Nick Sanders, president of the Fort McMurray Chamber of Commerce, had mixed feelings about the closing.

“We’re sorry to see any kind of business move or disappear from this town,” he said. “But sometimes, things need to change.”

While municipal council gets excited about the future of downtown Fort McMurray, Fox and hundreds of other patrons had their minds fixated towards the past on Saturday night.

“Not a lot of places in Canada can say they had generations of customers drinking in their establishment,” he said. “It’s going to be hard to replace history."

Fort McMurray Today/July 24, 2012